Congratulations to Los Angeles Metro, the latest transit agency to make connections (also called transfers) free. There are footnotes: you have to be using a smartcard, but if you're in Los Angeles for more than a day or two you should already have one. The big point is this: The core of the Los Angeles transit network is the liberating high-frequency grid, which relies on the assumption that passengers can be asked to change buses once. Until now, the agency's policy of charging passengers extra to change buses was in direct conflict with the foundational principle of its network design.

Once more with feeling; Charging passengers extra for the inconvenience of connections is insane. It discourages exactly the customer behavior that efficient and liberating networks depend on. It undermines the whole notion of a transit network. It also gives customers a reason to object to network redesigns that deliver both greater efficiency and greater liberty, because by imposing a connection on their trip it has also raised their fare.

For that reason, actual businesses don't do it. When supposedly business minded bureaucrats tell us we should charge for connections, they are revealing that they have never stopped to think about the geometry of the transit product, but are just assuming it's like soap or restaurants. Tell them to think about airlines: Airfares that require a connection are frequently cheaper than nonstops. That's because the connection is something you endure for the sake of an efficient airline network, not an added service that you should pay extra for.

There was, for a while, an argument against free transfers that arose from the ease of abusing paper transfer slips. These slips, issued in return for a cash fare and to be presented on your second bus or train, were easy to give away or sell. Many US systems eliminated transfers and offered day passes instead, which improved security but at the high cost of discouraging spontaneous trips.

In any case, as soon as a transit agency has a working smartcard, there's no excuse for connection charges. They sometimes linger because managers and elected officials are desperate for revenue but are afraid to raise the base cash fare. In some cities, local journalists are too lazy to understand fare structures and just write quick scare stories whenever the base fare goes up. This motivates transit agencies to do desperate and devious-looking things to raise other charges, just as a simplistic obsession with low fares has caused airlines to invent endless fees.

But what matters is not just that the fare be low. It needs to be fair, and it needs to encourage people to use the system in more efficient ways. An efficient and liberating network requires connections, so penalizing connections is an attack on your network's efficiency.

Everyone! This is the next app that Every Serious Transit Agency Needs to Implement ASAP. It could easily be as transformative as realtime information.

A while back, our Portland transit agency Tri-Met unveiled a mobile ticketing app, which my colleague Evan Landman reviewed here. It allows you to purchase tickets in bulk with a credit card and store them on your phone. When you need one, you push a button and a "ticket" appears on your phone, very much like an airline boarding pass. Right now in Portland, you just show that to the driver, but before long I expect we'll scan a barcode just as we do to board airplanes.

Our two fulltime staff and I are all occasional transit users, so not motivated to buy monthly passes, and all three of us can now report that we use transit more in Portland because we can use it spontaneously without worrying about whether we have $2.50 in cash. This not only reduces cash handling and thus speeds up boarding, it attracts more occasional riders!

And if you're a transit agency, you need to love occasional riders, not just regular ones. A vast number of citizens who find you occasionally useful, and whom you welcome with an easy boarding experience no matter how long it's been, can be a big part of your political base.

So congratulations to Capital Metro in Austin for rolling out a similar app. And if your transit agency doesn't offer this liberating tool, encourage them to develop it. It increases ridership, builds broader loyalty, and speeds up boarding. What's not to love?

When it provides free connections, as a Los Angeles Metro report is finally proposing to do. The Bus Riders Union is screaming about a fare hike, but for many riders -- those whose trips require a connection -- the proposal is a fare reduction, because the transfer penalty to be eliminated ($1.50) is far bigger than the hike in the base fare ($0.25)

The vast dense core of Los Angeles is one of North America's great grid systems, designed to allow easy travel between any point A and any point B via a single connection. Unfortunately, their current fare structure charges for a connection. This makes as much sense as a road tolling system that charges only for turns.

It's nonsense. Connections are an inconvenience to passengers that is required by the structure of an efficient network. Charging for connections encourages riders to demand wildly inefficient services like the late and famous 305, which zigzag diagonally across the grid, increasing complexity without adding much useful service. It amounts to punishing customers for helping Metro run an efficient and attractive service pattern.

Like other fees, fare penalties for connections arise in part because journalists and activists over-react to the base fare figure, creating more political heat for raising that number. So like money-losing airlines, the agencies have to look for other things to charge for to hit their fare recovery targets. But charging for connections is counterproductive, because connections are the foundation of the network. Airlines don't do it. In fact, airfares via a connection are often cheaper than the nonstop. That's because the connecting itinerary lets the airline run a more efficient service pattern.

So don't believe the news about a proposed fare hike in LA. Some people will experience one, but many cash paying passengers, who are often among the lower-income riders, will save.

And one thing's even more important than that: The pricing scheme won't be crazy anymore.

Evan Landman is an associate at my firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates, and serves as a research assistant and ghostwriter on this blog. He holds a BA in Human Geography from University of British Columbia and was formerly an intern for the Portland area regional government, Metro. He tweets on transit and other Portland topics at @evanlandman.

For as long as I can remember, every bus trip in Portland has started with the counting and recounting of small bills and change held in a sweaty palm, always with the low-level anxiety from the thought of dropping a quarter and being unable to board. Pay your fare at the farebox, recieve a flimsy newsprint ticket. Secret that ticket in a secure pocket, to prevent it from being carried away by a stray gust of wind. If you have to transfer, check your pocket every 30 seconds to make sure it's still there.

TriMet, the transit agency here in Portland, finally launched their long-awaited smartphone app on Wednesday. I've tried it out for most of my trips since, after a summer spent jealously reading tweets from people lucky enough to be invited to the beta test. My first impression: this application suddenly makes using Portland's bus system much more relevant to me, and I suspect to many others.

Trimet Tickets ticket window

TriMet's ticketing application was developed by a company called GlobeSherpa, which is in the business of building mobile ticketing software for clients like sports arenas, concert venues, transit agencies, and parking providers. TriMet didn't have to lay anything out financially in developing this tool; angel investors covered those costs. GlobeSherpa skims a percentage off the top of each transaction.

The app is free to download, but once you've got it, you'll have to use a credit or debit card to buy electronic tickets at the usual price. To use a ticket on a trip, you simply press the "use" button, and an animated ticket screen appears. It's as easy as showing this screen to the driver upon boarding; no need to fumble for change or a flimsy paper transfer. This screen remains animated as long as the ticket is good, and shows the exact time at which it expires. It is even possible to use multiple tickets at once, a valuable feature for parents and caregivers.

I'll admit that since relocating back to Portland in 2012, despite living without a car, I have rarely used TriMet's bus network. This is not because it doesn't go to the places I need to travel to, or because it is too infrequent; rather, I simply do not often find myself in possession of change or small bills, and generally choose modes that don't require those things. I pay for most everything using a debit or credit card, because it allows me to track my funds with more accuracy, and because the rounding error that is change adds up over time, but is difficult to spend, keep track of or incorporate back into my accounts.

The agency is no doubt targeting young adults like me in developing this product. Numbers from Pulse, a research arm of Discover, find that members of the Millenial generation have the highest rate of ownership of debit cards (80%) and of contactless payment devices (12%); and the highest rate of online micro payments.

Lest I be accused of spreading propaganda for the agency, it is worth acknowledging that this is a tool useful only to people who have both a credit or debit card and a smartphone. As of May 2013, according to Pew, 56% of Americans had a smartphone, which means that 44% did not. Rates of ownership track with income and educational attainment, but are most strongly correlated with age. This sort of payment system largely excludes seniors, among whom only 18% report ownership of a device capable of running the software. As you might expect, many more Millenials (81%) own smartphones.

Freedom of mobility is a frequent topic here at Human Transit. How well does the network design and operation enable a person to move around the city? How well do the transit agency's materials communicate the possibilities for personal mobility? How does the agency make transit a reasonable choice? In the age of Amazon, Paypal, and in-app purchases, giving riders the option to pay in this way is an important step towards creating a truly civilized transit experience.

Generally, transit systems without fares are either really small and often rural -- situations where the fares may not even cover the costs of charging fares -- or else college towns, where the university is often subsidizing most of the ridership anyway. But there's the interesting case of Tallinn, Estonia. This is a significant city and capital, population 426,000, and it's posting results:

Tallinn’s transportation department reports that traffic fell by 10 percent, meaning about 7,600 fewer cars in the city per day.

In that context, this passage from Jake's article was interesting:

Would such a scheme work in a mid-to-large American city? According to Jennifer Perone’s 2002 study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation and Florida Department of Transportation, it isn’t likely. While she wrote that free transit is manageable and worthwhile in rural regions and small towns, she cautioned against such a policy for larger systems:

All well-informed transit professionals that were contacted for their opinions spoke strongly against the concept of free fares for large systems, suggesting some minimal fare needs to be in place to discourage vagrancy, rowdiness and a degradation of service.

These experts drew on the experiences of three mid-sized American cities that briefly experimented with fare free transit. Between 1978 and 1979, both Trenton, N.J., and Denver, Colo. offered free transit during non-peak hours. In both cases, ridership increased (by 16 percent and 36 percent, respectively). The authors claim however, that these were generally not people lured from cars, but were what they call “problem riders.” In Trenton, 92 percent of transit drivers reported that their jobs were less enjoyable after the free fare program was instituted. These issues, along with revenue problems, caused both cities to discontinue their experiments after a year.

It would be interesting to see if the last 11 years have changed US expert opinion. I'm sure it wasn't true that a 16-36 percent increase in ridership consisted largely of "problem riders," though I'm sure there were enough problem riders to be an issue. The new riders were probably mostly people getting where they're going, and quite possibly triggering fewer car trips as a result. And are we sure that nobody sold a car as a result of the free service?

(A significant share of transit trips by people without cars would be "chauffeured" if transit were not available; that is, someone would have made a car trip to transport the person. This is especially true of senior/disabled riders and essential errands, which therefore count as Vehicle Miles Traveled reductions due to transit, not just social-service benefits. Is your transit agency taking due credit for these?)

It sounds as though the authors were operating on the old binary model of choice-vs-captive ridership, under which additional ridership by people who don't own cars is assigned zero value to environmental or traffic outcomes. In fact, the overall transit service offering (including its cost) is an important in many people's choice not to own cars. The choice to not own a car is one of many complex possibilities that fries the circuits of algorithms (and experts) that rely on dividing all riders into boxes called choice (car owners who left the car at home) and captive or transit dependent. In fact, we're all on a spectrum between choice and captive, and we are each in different situations that may make us responsive to small improvements in transit service or, in this case, cost. If that weren't true, small changes in frequency or fare wouldn't cause small changes in ridership, as they almost always do.

It is likely that in the US experiments, there were enough "problem riders" to be a problem, but the obvious solution to this is Tallinn's solution, which is to require each free rider to use a smartcard, one that takes some effort to get and that can be revoked for bad behavior.

The problem with free-fare systems in big cities is not the "problem rider." The problem is that free fares cause such a huge ridership increase that no big-city US transit agency could possibly fund enough service to handle it. It would not just require the purchase and operations funds for hundreds if not thousands of new buses (and new facilities for them to be housed and maintained). It would also quickly require whole new rapid transit lines. Most of our current modelling of rapid transit in the US assumes that fares will continue to hold ridership down.

So yes, free fares would be a big deal in big cities (though not as much for small ones). They are a huge barrier to cross, especially for impoverished US transit systems in major cities. They would require a transformative degree of new public investment. All that must be debated.

In response to my post on Tallinn, Estonia's experiment in free transit for all city residents, a freelance reporter asked me:

The idea I'm most interested in exploring from your post is your proposal that smart farecard systems can be used to easily subsidize fares and "opening up a huge range of subsidy possibilities for any entity that sees an advantage in doing so." I'd like to get more of a sense of what you mean by that and whether this is possible even in today's austerity-obsessed environment.

What I mean is that as long as the transit agency sets a price for an unlimited ride pass -- with appropriate discounts for bulk purchasers -- anyone can buy those passes for anyone. Universities can buy them for their students, companies for their employees, and as in Tallinn, cities can even buy them for their citizens. Any other entity can also buy them for any group of people it cares about, yielding possibilities that we can barely envision now.

Is this realistic in an age of austerity? It depends on what the alternatives are. The alternatives may include building wildly expensive parking, or losing out in a competition for the best people.

Urban universities with constrained sites often subsidize transit because without it they would need unmanageable amounts of parking. One common reason that universities get into transit subsidies is that they want to build on their surface parking lots, and the cost of structured parking (and its impacts) turns out to be higher than the cost of buying transit passes for many years. So it can be a logical business decision.

We're used to the idea that companies leave the cost of commuting to their employees, but companies that are competing for the best talent don't have that luxury. Witness the huge fleets of shuttles that ferry employees to Silicon Valley giants like Google and Apple from as far away as San Francisco. Companies that compete for talent can find transit subsidies to be a reasonable part of a total compensation package. And of course, corporate campuses can have expansion crises much like those of universities, where they'd like to build on their parking lots and look for alternatives to expensive structured parking.

City governments are the hardest to imagine financing free fares in the US, if only because of how broke most of them are. But if it goes well in Tallinn the idea will spread. One problem in much of America, and notably in California, is that residents are net consumers of government services while employers are net subsidizers of them; this motivates cities to minimize their populations and maximize their employment. (This explains many odd shapes of city boundaries that seek to include jobs but exclude residents.). In those distorted tax environments, cities don't want people to live there so much as to work there, so subsidies to residents don't make much sense. But of course residents are the voters, and wealthy cities that value green credentials may sometimes see merit. And of course cities aldo benefit if it can reduce their parking requirements, which may increasingly be the nexus that makes fare subsidies make sense.

Remember, though, that massive fare subsidies don't just require the replacement revenue for the fares but also the revenue needed to add service to handle the crowding that the free fares will generate. I will be interested to see how this plays out in Tallinn. This has been the barrier to free transit in big cities that have studied it, and the main reason that only small towns -- especially university towns -- have made large scale fare subsidies work.

It's too soon to say, but Tallinn, Estonia (pop. 425,000) is now by far the largest city to offer fare-freefree public transit -- not just in Europe but anywhere in the world as near as I can tell. Most other free-transit communities are either university-dominated small cities (like Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Hasselt, Belgium) or rural networks where ridership is so low that fares don't pay for the costs of fare collection technology, let alone contribute toward operating cost.

As the city's webpage explains, Tallinn citizens must still buy a farecard, which will allow them to ride free. This allows the transit network to continue to collect fares from tourists and people living in other cities.

This raises the interesting possibility that any city, inside a bigger metro area with a regional transit system, could elect to subsidize transit fares for its own residents, by simply buying fares in bulk and giving them away to its own residents -- just as some universities and employers already do for their own students or staff. Indeed, smart farecards make it possible for anyone to subsidize fares without much complexity, opening up a huge range of subsidy possibilities for any entity that sees an advantage in doing so. Yet another reason that city governments are not as helpless about transit as they often think, even if they don't control their transit system.

Peter Brown is a lifelong UK transit enthusiast (and an HT reader from the earliest days). He is a member of the Light Rail Transit Association (LRTA), and a former volunteer tram driver at Seaton Tramway, Devon, England.

The latest issue is the stated ambition of the Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive (PTE), which today calls itself 'Nexus,' to restore government control of planning and management for the bus system in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne/Gateshead/Sunderland conurbation. This is significant because for a few years in the 1980s this authority operated the UK's only example of an integrated transport system on a par with European best practise -- a system that was destroyed by the Thatcher government.

In the early 1980s, the Tyne and Wear PTE directly operated a large bus system which was formed by the takeover of the former municipal fleets of Newcastle, Gateshead, and Sunderland, and also built and operated the LRT system (The Metro). During the short life of this integrated system it was possible to travel between any two points on a single ticket by bus, local train, Metro, and ferry services. The bus system was redesigned to feed into the metro at purpose built interchanges for journeys into central Newcastle, thus reducing bus movements across the heavily congested Tyne bridges. Unfortunately the Thatcher Government deregulation of bus services destroyed this integrated network. Deregulation swept away a regulated system that had existed in the UK since the 1930s. It meant that bus companies (referred to as ‘Operators’ in the UK) had to self financing through the fare box. Blanket subsidies and any form of network co-ordination (or what Americans would call "integrated network planning") were terminated. In short, it became illegal to think of transit as a public resource, integrated with the city, and managed for greatest possible efficiency and usefulness.

Instead, the ideal became competition. Bus operators could operate "commercial" (non-subsidised) networks anywhere, and the role of local government became to purchase subsidized services wherever more service was desired. Integrated transit features that many cities take for granted -- including citywide fare systems, lines that aim to connect with one another, and rational management of limited resources, became effectively impossible.

Yet if the goal was competition, the system failed. As in most of the UK today, there is very little direct on-the-road competition between the three bus companies in Tyne and Wear. Instead, each company has settled into a "territory" in which the lack of competition is the key to profitability. Passenger journeys starting in one operator's territory that finish in another's require the passenger to change buses and pay twice. Nexus is no longer happy about this and wants to take over the commercial networks and purchase operations from the bus companies - this is known as a 'Quality Contract' and there is new (as yet unused) legislation to do this.

In short a Quality Contract would involve the suspension of deregulation within a specified area and the imposition of a tendered system whereby the transport authority would specify the network, fares, frequencies etc. As urban bus operation outside London is a profitable activity (nationally approximately 90% of bus mileage requires no direct revenue support) the proponents of Quality Contracts believe that massive subsidies would not be required. In order to bring about a Quality Contract several conditions must be satisfied, with an independent board to adjudicate. The promoters would have to prove that the new system would:

have a positive impact on the use of bus services

will be of benefit to users of bus services by improving quality

will contribute to the implementation of the local transport policies

achieve all the above in an economic, efficient and effective manner.

All the above leave lots of room for argument against them, and since the commercial operators would in effect have their businesses sequestrated without compensation it is likely they will use the legal process in full, including the European Court of Human Rights.The alternative approach for a local transport authority to increase its influence in the provision of bus services is the 'Statutory Quality Partnership' as demonstrated in Oxford last year using powers from the 2008 Transport Act.

The 2008 Act expands the terms of the previous voluntary Quality Partnership model to allow a LTA [Local Transport Authority -- the tier of local government responsible for transport] to specify requirements as to frequencies, timings or maximum fares as part of the standard of service to be provided under a scheme, in addition to quality standards. But it also provides important safeguards to ensure that unrealistic conditions are not imposed on operators, and that their legitimate right to a fair commercial rate of return on their investment is not undermined. The process by which an operator can object to particular standards included in a scheme relating to frequencies, timings or maximum fares, is an important feature of this. But at the same time it places a responsibility on them to justify the grounds for their objection, thus minimising the scope for vexatious or frivolous objections.

In the context of Oxford, where such a scheme was implemented last year, there is no history of municipal bus operation. This could account for the partnership approach being more acceptable to that LTA.

That's what I'm being told about the new fare system at the Hudson River ferry operator New York Waterway. You can now buy a ticket using your smartphone and then use the phone itself to present the ticket to the fare reader, similar to the "digital boarding passes" already used by airlines. No paper required. Expect this to spread in high-end commuter markets.

It would be great to see this spread in urban bus transit, where boarding times are still a dominant problem, but that will rely a very easy-to-use app and compatibility with smartcard media now under development. My guess is that we'll get a ubiquitous commercial smartcard-creditcard first, which will do the same job.

The frequent commuter program has two goals. One is to increase people's loyalty to the public transport system. We want people to be disloyal to their cars, to cheat on their cars. And the second major goal is to decongest the peak time trains and buses. The problem is that it is unpleasant to take a trip during the peak time. If we could achieve both goals with the frequent commuter project, it would be great.

The nice thing about this project is that it is going to do exactly what the airline miles do. You take a 10 kilometer trip, you get 10 credits. And Singapore can measure the kilometers. But if you make that same trip in the off-peak time, you'll get 30 credits. This creates new bonding between you and the system. People don't think of the indignity of taking a three-stop trip on their preferred airline versus a direct cheaper flight sometimes. In fact, they see the angle as, "I'm earning more miles."

Does anyone with regular experience in transit think this is a good idea? If so, I'd like to hear. My first reaction:

This sounds like a very very complicated way to do discounts for off-peak riders, and to reward very regular riders. The fact is, the transit industry already has a system for rewarding frequent riders; it's called a monthly or annual pass.

A simpler solution to the peak overcrowding problem is to provide discounts for off-peak trips, as Seattle, for example, has done for decades. This costs very little to administer and has the desired effect much more directly.

When the need for sheer service is so urgent, why would a transit agency take on the massive administrative cost of a frequent-rider program, when the same money could go into driving buses and trains instead?

I'm sure transit professionals will appreciate the interest from the "big ideas" people. But from Madrigal's summary, this idea sounds like a fun metaphor inappropriately applied, suggesting the lack of any technical understanding of the transit capacity problem.

Is it fair to have to pay more if your trip requires a transfer or connection? I've argued that it isn't, but I also have an appreciation of the difficulty of eliminating these penalties. So when complaining about a fare penalty, try to understand the situation from the transit agency's point of view. Not because they're right and you're wrong, but because you many need to help them solve the problem that it presents for them.

Definitions first. A connection penalty is any element of a fare policy whose effect is to charge people more for a trip that requires two or more transit vehicles than for a trip using only one, even when the trip is of exactly the same distance and when there's no evident difference in class, amenity, or inefficiency to justify a surcharge.

For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald's inquiry on Sydney's public transit, I prepared this table showing the difference between rail fares and rail+bus fares for trips of exactly the same distance:

My basic view of connection penalities has always been this: The connection is not an added convenience for which the customer should pay extra. It's an inconvenience required by the geometry of any efficient, legible, and frequent transit system. Transit systems must therefore do what they can to minimize this inconvenience and encourage people to make connections. Connection fare penalties are exactly contrary to this imperative.

As near as I can tell, most fare penalties for connecting arise from some mixture of four basic issues:

Practical security problems around the physical tools used to record connections, such as the opportunities for fare evasion created by abundant transfer slips. If this is the primary reason for a connection penalty, smartcard systems will eliminate the problem and should lead to removal of the connection penalty.

Laws and funding arrangements that refer explicitly to the cash single-ride fare. A key funding formula that governs Los Angeles County transit agencies gives these agencies more subsidy if they push their base fare downward. The formula is actually trying to reward ridership, but because ridership is hard to measure across multiple agencies, it estimates ridership as the fare revenue divided by cash single-ride fare. This penalizes agencies for raising their cash single-ride fares, and encourages them to invent other fees and fare penalties instead, for reasons that have nothing to do with the real intentions of the formula. Again, smartcards, which will provide a more accurate and direct measure of ridership, should eliminate the need for such approximations and the perverse incentives that follow from them.

A journalistic obsession with single-ride cash fare as the key measure of fare cost. The single-ride cash fare is easy to talk about, and journalists and other non-transit-experts tend to focus on it, producing soundbites such as "Los Angeles fares are cheaper than San Francisco's." Prevalence of these soundbites motivates agencies to try, for reasons of appearance, to keep their cash single-ride fares down. Again, this is just like airlines: If you become obsessed with reducing your base ticket price at all costs, you'll have to invent more and more fees, and connection penalties are one fee of that type.

Conflicts between the self-interests of geographically entangled agencies or operators. In multi-agency or multi-operator environments, the introduction of a free connection can come at the expense of the bottom lines of multiple operators, and tends to affect different operators differently. These problems are sometimes overcome through heroic negotiation, in which the operators agree to shift money among themselves in complex ways in order to present a simple integrated fare system to the customer. In other cases (as in Brisbane) the solution is to create a new meta-agency that sits over all the operators, pays them for operations, receives their fare revenue, and takes responsibility for a single region-wide or city-wide bottom line.

So it's hard. It's important, and good transit agencies are at least thinking about the problem, but it's still hard. In multi-agency cases, for example, the problem may impossible to solve without creating a meta-agency, with all the attendant anxiety about "adding another layer of government."

What can a citizen do? One thing is to confront journalists and others who try to make simplistic comparisons based on cash single-ride fares. Journalists: if you want to do quick pieces about fares, look for average fares (fare revenue divided by ridership) rather than published base fares. Yes, this is harder because not all agencies can calculate ridership reliably, or (as in Los Angeles) they may actually be relying on fare revenue to get to a ridership estimate. Again, though, smartcards should eliminate that problem.

Finally, since I've now referred twice to smartcards solving the problem, let me be clear: Technology can solve information problems, but not ethical ones. Connection penalties based on the inadequacy of information-tracking tools should fade away once smartcards provide the necessary tool. But technology won't change the poltical problem: to eliminate fare penalties without losing revenue, you will probably have to raise the single-ride cash fare to compensate. Effectively you'll be admitting that you've been subsidizing some riders at the expense of others, and you should expect all the blowback that we see anywhere when we tell people that we're removing a subsidy on which they've come to rely.

That's the real problem, and courageous leadership is the only solution for it.

Sometimes a comment is so representative of a common point of view that I want to share it even though I neither agree or disagree exactly. Sometimes too, a comment raises a language point that's worth noticing. From David Vartanoff:

From my [point of view] lack of free transfers and distance based fares are de facto redlining of neighborhoods. The [Washington DC] WMATA and [San Francisco area] BART [rail transit] systems compound this by making feeder bus usage a further charge. Given that fares have almost no relation to the actual cost of the trip in question, high fares and transfer surcharges are simply disincentives to use. In the[San Francisco] Bay Area, each agency has different fare policies making longer trips confusing and unnecessarily expensive compared to similar mileages in say Chicago or New York.

"De facto redlining" is almost but not quite a contradiction, as "redlining" is generally intentional while "de facto" can refer to a pattern that's observable in outcomes but was never anyone's intention. Still, we often have to take responsibility for "de facto" outcomes of what we do, so an accusation of redlining is a good way to raise the stress level of transit managers and the elected officials that they report to. However, stressing out your leadership is not always the key to solving a problem, if the leaders may perceive the problem to be out of their control.

I don't believe that many transit agency managers and boards are motivated by animus toward particular neighborhoods. But accusations of de facto disfavor toward certain neighborhoods are very emotive, especially to people with experience in racial politics and to older people who remember much more explicit kinds of redlining practiced in the not-too-distant past. And of course, they're also emotive becuase they're about home, which is always an emotional topic.

So before you go too far with "redlining" accusations, tempting as they are, try to understand why connection penalities happen. That's the subject of the very next post.

Are transit fares in Los Angeles cheaper than in San Francisco? That's the impression you'll get from a direct comparison of the base adult cash fare. The travel blog Price of Travel just compared the base fares of 80 major tourist cities around the world, and noted that while San Francisco Muni's base fare is $2.00, that of the Los Angeles County MTA is $1.50.

Yes, but San Francisco offers a free transfer, so that a $2.00 fare takes you anywhere in the city. In Los Angeles, you can travel along one line for $1.50, but many trips require a connection, and in that case you'll pay $3.00.

The journalistic temptation to cite and compare base fares is one reason that transit agencies feel pressed to keep that number low, which in turn pressures them to raise revenue other ways, such as by charging for transfers. It's a bit the way budget airlines work, offering huge discounts but then charging fees for all kinds of things.

Los Angeles County transit agencies also labor under a peculiar funding arrangement in which a certain countywide funding source is allocated according to fare revenue divided by base fare. So if you keep your base fare down (by charging for "extras," such as connections) you get more money from the county! This formula was intended to be a proxy for ridership, which is hard to measure, so one hopes that once smartcards become a reliable way to count riders, the formula and its perverse consequences can be left behind. Of course, the real challenge will be to count complete passenger trips rather than boardings. (The latter are easier to count, but double-count trips requiring a connection.)

Even Southwest Airlines will sell you a ticket from your origin to your destination, rather than making you buy each segment separately. In fact, the ticket from A to B via a connection at C usually doesn't cost more than the ticket from A to B nonstop, because the airline recognizes that you're changing at C for their convenience, not yours.

Connections, or transfers as North Americans depressingly call them, are the foundation of a simple, frequent transit network that's there whenever you need it. I laid out the basic argument here, but in brief, a transit system that tries to run direct service from everywhere else (so that nobody has to make a connection) ends up as a confusing tangle of hundreds of overlapping lines, few of which are frequent enough to rely on or simple enough to remember.

But once you decide to offer free connections, you face challenges. Rail rapid transit systems usually let you change trains behind the faregates without paying another fare, but surface transit systems (bus, rail or ferry) struggle with how to encourage transfers without encouraging fare evasion. If you give paying passengers a transfer slip providing a free ride on a connecting service, you get all kinds of abuse: people who don't need the transfer slip sometimes sell it, or give it away, or simply drop it where someone else can find it, and ride free.

The blog of Vancouver's transit agency TransLink, called The Buzzer, recently featured this 1974 explanation of "transfer regulations" in that city, as printed on the route map. It's a nice example of the kind of regulation that was common at that time.

Note how much complexity follows from trying to insist that transfer slips must be used only for connections, and that you must not do anything else while connecting. The authors have thought of everything you could conceivably do that isn't exactly what they intend, and are resolved to prohibit all of it in meticulous detail.

Fortunately, not many transit agencies take this tone with their customers anymore.

There seem to be three defensible approaches to connection-pricing, at least in the North American and Australasian contexts where I work:

One is to stop giving transfer slips, but instead sell a reasonably priced day pass. This is now common in parts of the US, especially in the sunbelt. With a day pass, you charge a bit more and in return you give up trying to control how the slip is used. Of course, this is still unfair to people making spontaneous one-time trips, which are, in my view, a pretty foundational element of healthy urban life.

An intermediate approach, modeled by AC Transit in Oakland, is to provide a transfer slip for a nominal extra charge, such as 25 cents. This is supposed to deter people who don't need one from taking them, and thus reducing the number that are discarded where others can pick them up and use them.

The third approach, which I have to say I prefer, is to take a deep breath and just not worry about it. Give out free transfer slips because the design of your system is based on encouraging connections. Treat the transfer slip as a 90-minute or two-hour pass, good for unlimited rides within that short period. Do what you can to discourage them from being sold or transferred, but don't try to control how they're used by the person to whom they're issued. If someone can make a quick round trip in that time, or do a stopover, then that's fine. Portland's TriMet, Vancouver's TransLink and San Francisco Muni all do this, as do the integrated networks in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia. In all these places, and many more, a base fare buys you unlimited use for 90-120 minutes with the fare zones specified.

Of course, there are lots of other kinds of connection-pricing policy out there, including a range of partial policies and non-policies, and it all gets much more complicated where there are multiple entangled transit operators watching their own balance sheets, and no citywide agency with the power to co-ordinate them.

Many of the security problems around transfer slips should disappear in the new era of smartcards. A good GPS-based smartcard system will know that you got off another transit vehicle nine minutes ago, so it will be able to determine whether you should be charged a new fare when you board the next one. It will be interesting to see whether agencies that still have fare penalties for connections take the opportunity to elminate them. It will still be politically hard: if you eliminate your connection penalty without raising the base fare, your revenue will tick downward. If you raise the base fare to compensate, lazy journalists will do stories about your evil fare increase, ignoring the larger fairness of the change.

But one thing is true everywhere, because it's a matter of geometry: if you want frequency and simplicity in your network, you have to encourage connections. So any pricing scheme that penalizes connections, or that shrouds them with punitive rules like this 1974 policy, is in conflict with those basic goals.

Now, officials with Guangzhou's transportation authorities said they had to rescind the offer as more than 8 million passengers took the subway on an average day beginning November 1, a figure "much, much higher" than the subway system was designed to carry.

Average daily ridership when fares were charged was 3.8 million, so the free fare caused a doubling of demand.

Guangzhou authorities plan to roll back the free-day scheme on Nov. 8 and replace it with a cash subsidy program in which each household in Guangzhou will receive 150 yuan as a transportation subsidy from the government.

Fares are the source of so much controversy and hassle that it's always tempting to try to make them free. A quick scan of "success stories" in this regard shows the pattern: You can do it in rural areas and small cities where demand is low. You can do it in university-dominated towns, where students are most of the market and are riding anyway. And you can do it in a downtown area, specifically to make short trips within downtown easy.

In each of those cases, you're giving away something for which you anticpate low demand, and for which you have adequate supply.

But citywide free transit in a big city, especially during the peak commute, is the opposite. You're giving away something that is in high demand, and for which you have a limited supply.

You could also design and scale a transit service from the beginning with the intent that it be free. New York's Staten Island Ferry comes to mind, along with many specialized shuttles and most elevators. Many road networks, of course, have been designed and scaled with exactly this intention.

But if you propose to just eliminate the fares on an existing big-city transit system, the answer is always the same: Even while charging a fare, big city transit is crowded during the peak. Inevitably, you don't have enough buses and trains to handle the flood of ridership that would result from free fares. Now, thanks to Guangzhou, we can see the same point proven in practice.

Could a big city transition gradually to totally free fares? Sure, but only in the sense that an American city could build 100 mi of subways in the next decade: i.e. if money were no object. If you assume that eliminating fares would double ridership -- including on the peak -- then you'd have to double your fleet, double your workforce, and duplicate any track or roadway that's already congested with full trains or buses. In most big cities, that would mean duplicating downtown subway lines and stations, which is at least as expensive as building new ones, if the space to do it exists at any price. Would you save a small bundle on fare equipment and staffing? Sure. Would that be enough to pay for all that new capacity? Not even close.

(Aaron Renn, who writes The Urbanophile, is an opinion-leading urban affairs analyst, consultant, and speaker, based in the US Midwest.)

When I'm at home, I ride bus and rail transit about equally. But when I travel to a new city, I travel on rail systems frequently, but almost never use the bus. Why?

For me, while I know how transit systems generally work, the specifics of fares and fare media are different from place to place. I know that if I show up at a rail station there is likely to be a station house where I can look at maps, read about fares and rules, and use nice machines with step by step instructions for purchasing tickets or other fare media.

On the bus, by contrast, often it's difficult to find route maps and fare information at a stop, and if you board a bus you must have exact change if you don't already have some type of fare media. This can cause a lot of embarrassment and irritation, particularly if you are holding up boarding or delaying the bus departure because you don't know how it works. I generally decide discretion is the better part of valor and skip the bus.

A plan out of London could possibly help eliminate part of the problems with the bus for out of town visitors. Transport for London, along with various other agencies around the world like the NY MTA and Chicago's CTA, are looking to replace their current proprietary and expensive to operate fare card systems with open fare media based on the same types of payment options available in the marketplace. Transport for London would like to see these efforts coordinated, such as the resulting systems would share an open architecture that would allow you to use the same fare media in all of the cities.

This would eliminate one of the major barriers to riding the bus in an unfamiliar city. With my fully charged Chicago fare medium, I could board with confidence, not having to worry about exact change or unknown types of ticketing systems. Even if signage does not improve, my mobile phone probably will, allowing me even easier access to transit info than I have today. Hopefully, this combination will make it much less intimidating for people to ride buses in unfamiliar cities.

A frequent commenter on HT asks this in an email (the links are mine, not his):

On Second Avenue Sagas, one of the discussions went on a tangent
that left me wondering about transfer penalties. If you need to walk
from one station to another on the street to transfer, do the ridership
models assign a higher penalty than if there's an enclosed corridor
between the stations? In addition, for systems that have faregates, is
there an extra penalty for transfers that require exiting and
reentering?

Modeling can be a murky business, and I'm definitely not a modeler. But the bottom line is that the factors used in a ridership model have to be based on some sort of reality, and the reality of North America and Australasia is that most connections are not especially pleasant or easy, especially when there are fare penalities or delay-inducing features such as fare gates. Ease of connection varies a lot from one situation to another based on factors that are hard to model -- not just walking distances but things like street crossings, vertical circulation systems (stairs or escalator? elevator?), and of course fare co-ordination. Improvements in other areas can make a big difference. Smartcards, for example, are faster and easier to use than magnetic strip tickets, which must be manually inserted in a slot; these should make connecting easier.

So my guess is that it's hard to model transfer penalities very exactly. But let me pass on the question to all the anonymous modeling professionals that are reading. What's your answer to this reader's question? If you're working in North America, do your transfer penalties consider very high-quality transfers, such as the cross-platform connections that often occur in European subways? BART in the San Francisco Bay Area may know something about this, since they do have a cross-platform connection in Oakland, though it's only used for low-demand trip pairs and so may not offer sufficient robust information. Agencies that do a lot of timed-transfer among buses, especially at island stations where no street crossings are required, may also know something about this.

Modelers! If you're not comfortable posting a comment here, send me an email, and I'll use it anonymously.

Singapore's weekend Straits Times was full of debate about the recent fare system changes, which finally eliminated fare penalties for connecting from one service to another.

Eliminating these penalties is a crucial step in creating an integrated and versatile transit network, because (a) networks designed around connections are more legible and frequent than those that aren't and (b) transferring is already enough of a hassle without these penalties. The new system means that your fare from A to B will now be the same regardless of the path you take and the number of times you transfer. This, in turn, will allow the transit agency to design a simpler and more reliable system.

To take just one example, many bus lines duplicate MRT rapid transit corridors, partly because fare penalities for transferring encouraged riders to stay on these buses instead of change to the MRT. This was always silly from the transit agency's standpoint. Remember: To get a rider to her destination sooner is not just good for the rider. It's good for the transit agency, too, because the operatings costs of transit are measured mostly in time, so a faster trip uses less of it.

However, like many (but not all) great ideas, eliminating these penalties isn't free. When you eliminate a fare penalty that is bringing in a certain amount of revenue, you have two choices: increase the base fare -- which is a direct fare increase for people who aren't transferring -- or accept a drop in revenue. Singapore's transit agency did a little of both, and therefore got attacked from both sides. The new fare system has been running for a couple of months now, and inevitable complaints about the fare increase (on passengers who didn't transfer) are in full swing.

I'm impressed with the Straits Times coverage of this issue -- to which I'd link generously if it weren't behind a paywall. The reporter actually understood the financial reality underlying the choice and explained why other choices might have been worse. The prevailing critique of the transit agency was not that they did it, but that they oversold the change as a fare cut. In fact, it was a cut if you were already transferring and an increase if you weren't, and they probably could have been clearer about that.

Still, this is a good move. Singapore is in the early stage of rationalising its huge but confusing bus system, and this was an essential step toward making that possible. When New York City eliminated bus-subway connection penalities in 1996, the result was a small jump in subway ridership and a huge jump in bus ridership. I'll be interested in seeing Singapore's results.

I'm going
to say here what I said on the Urbanophile: it's an uncritical fluff
piece. The reality of SBS is that it's a substandard product by European
standards. The smoking gun is that during fare inspections on SBS, the
bus has to stand still. The inspectors drive in and have to drive back,
so the bus has to stay in one place until they get out.

If that's true, it certainly isn't consistent with the stated objectives of SBS, and must cause some serious disruptions. On the other hand, if refused to praise transit products because some aspect of them was compromised or at odds with the rest, I wouldn't have much to talk about. (Note, for example, Strasbourg's reputation for broken
ticket machines, now codified by Lonely Planet's French guide to the city.)

But I do try to note the compromise or failing when it's apparent, and thank Alon for pointing this out.